Why I Broke the Square
I started making the irregularly shaped paintings because I often couldn’t map the countryside I was looking at onto a rectangle. My perceptions of nature and a rectangle didn’t go together. The foreground looked shrunken and unimportant compared to the middle or far distance; or my view shifted drastically down, up, left, right; or areas of the motif expanded or contracted relative to other areas; or my experience of the motif was piecemeal because I couldn’t see all of it in a single glance. Adjusting the shape and its internal divisions became compelling. Why wouldn’t the shape of a painting be worked out in conjunction with working out the rest?
If a painting builds out to a rectangle, that’s fine. For some views of nature, a rectangle turns out to be a good fit. The possibility of an irregular shape doesn’t come first, leading the process, but rises as part of the process. It’s not a precondition but a solution to a problem, though one that of course raises other problems.
The history of art shows that flat rectangles are hardly the only kind of support. There are altarpieces, frescos, pottery decorations and mosaics that are not on rectangles or even on flat surfaces. We also now have numerous contemporary works, much more radical than mine, that combine painting and any kind of surface other than a flat rectangle. Of precedents, there are many.
Be that as it may, for easel painting the rectangle is a nearly universal convention. We are so familiar with the rectangle we take it for granted, barely notice it, look past it to the painting as a whole. The whole certainly includes the relation of contents to container, but container and contents go smoothly together. There’s no quarrel. With my irregularly shaped paintings, this doesn’t happen easily or automatically. The container is at first glance intrusive, distracting. People looking at one of these paintings notice the shape, and are stopped by it. They can’t get past the shape to what’s painted on it.
The answer is familiarity. Many who have trouble with the shapes in a gallery would get used to them if they saw them every day. The shape would become familiar. Then they’d see past the shape to what’s painted on it, see the painting as it’s meant to be seen, container to contents, as with any other integrated work, though perhaps with a bit of ungainliness, a bit of tension – which, it must be admitted, I court.
January, 2005